Desert Meditation

by Caitlin Maling

only solar power, water plastic-shipped-in, propane tanks for heat and food.

The sun has burnt for 4.5 billion years, fallen here for 4 million.

It’s easy to believe the light will outlast us,

glints of metal sands glowing at midday. At night,

the moon is another stone overturned in the canyon,

the ground cools and the animals you don’t see by day

leave the footprints you find in the morning–

javelinas and coyotes–the difference between ungulate hoof and mammal paw

held by the sand until dusk, when the wind blows

from over the border, over the Rio Grande,

and you don’t see anything anymore. Only sand,

the rough phonemes of what’s beyond the Guadalupe’s

flooding the plains.

ii)

Speech is unnecessary to song. The vermilion flycatchers rise

from the sosol to migrate south. The sky is the desert

we haven’t figured out how to colonise yet.

What use is a border to the desert? How to separate

one grain of sand in a dry river bed from the next?

The heat rises over the rockface, the edges of stone and sky blur

pink, orange, yellow, until both work down to ink.

A stone can skip in two

the river that runs through the Boccaccillo’s Canyon.

But when it floods, the plains fill and the border widens

so the tops of the yucca are the only flags,

green and greener the only nations.

iii)

From the plane, flying to Alice Springs,

the difference between the Great Sandy and Little Sandy deserts

cannot be quantified in sand

but in how the shrub unfurls in widening circles,

a slow linear gradation of vegetation.

At the top of Kings Canyon, you imagine

a line between WA and the Rock.

On the surface high above the desert,

the fossilized remains of strombolites

indicate this once was an ocean. In the stone,

the patterns of a sea hold.

Land does not age like people: It gets smoother;

it does not rust in water-it polishes.

Land outlasts what we call it.

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My husband and I went out West Texas way for the November holiday last year. We rented a cabin in Chihuahuan Desert you needed a 4wd to get to. While we there I was reading "The Arcadia Project: North American Postmodern Pastoral" which is an amazing anthology and it made me very interested in ideas of linguistic specificity and of how poetry can adapt and evolve scientific language and knowledge. While I've been living in Texas, I've been constantly trying to look for ways that it is similar to Australian landscapes, being in that desert made me aware of other times in central Australia and the poem emerged from there. We also spent a lot of time hiking in Big Bend National Park which is on the Rio Grande, the river that serves as the border between Texas and Mexico. Borders to me are very interesting, very slippery concepts, just as there's a space between a word and what it represents, this river was the liminal space between countries. So the poem is called a meditation because I was thinking very hard about all these things while trying to not reach any conclusions, to exist in that inbetweeness.

Caitlin Maling is a Western Australian poet whose first collection Conversations I’ve Never Had will be published by Fremantle Press in February 2015. Her work can be found, or is forthcoming, in Best Australian Poems, Australian Book Review, Westerly, Green Mountains Review, Threepenny, Australian Poetry and Meanjin, among others. This year she was shortlisted for the Judith Wright Poetry Prize and won the Harri Jones Memorial Award of the Newcastle Poetry Prize. She holds an MPhil in Criminological Research from Cambridge University and an MFA in poetry from the University of Houston. She has lived the past three years in Texas.